The Arabs of 1948: The Skeleton in the Peace Process Closet

Yehouda Shenhav *

For some two decades, with massive international support, liberal Israeli Jews have attempted to pursue the two-state solutionthe state of Israel and the state of Palestinebased on the Green Line border in one version or another (separation, border adjustments, with, or without, the settlement blocs) as a territorial marker of the end of the conflict. But while the two-state idea is romping around the capitals of Europe and North America as a tempting solution, from a political perspective, the idea is an empty slogan, without sufficient substance. Evidently, all the spectacular conferences and peace negotiationsOslo, Camp David, the Taba talks, and finally the Annapolis Conferencehave failed. In Jewish eyes, the common explanation for these failures is the absence of any Palestinian partner. However, the peace discourse is not at a dead-end because of the lack of a Palestinian partner; rather, a perpetual dead-end results from the Israeli regimes political theory, which time and again, leads to futile discussions.

According to this theory, the state of the Jewish nation must maintain an exclusive monopoly on territory and on the means for employing violence within it. This regime requires tools of oppression, among them an ongoing state of emergency, to ensure the homogeneity of Jewish national identity over the territorial spatial sphere, free from Palestinians with a collective identity. The Jewish state was established based upon this idea, and it continues to drive its all-out war against the Arabs of 1948 (Palestinians who carry Israeli passports) who aspire for an independent collective identity. Such a regime cannot possibly be democratic.

Jadal Jadal Issue no.10, June 2011

While the historical narrative on these actions may be complicated, there is no question that the Israeli sovereign state prevented the refugees from returning after the war and confiscated Palestinian land and property in order to establish territorial sovereignty for the Jewish collective. A political theory of this kind leaves no room for maintaining an independent collective Palestinian identity. The proof of
1

The Arabs of 1948 are the ultimate impediment to this regime inasmuch as they serve as a constant reminder of the skeleton it keeps in the closet: the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948the expulsion, the expropriation of land, the obliteration of towns and villages, and the inaccuracy of the historiographic narrative aimed at justifying all these actions. The fact that the cleansing of the Jewish sovereign territoryachieved by expelling Palestinians, by frightening them, and by forcing them to fleeremains incomplete leaves the ongoing presence of Palestinians in Israel as profound testimony to the undemocratic nature of Israeli sovereignty.

Mada al-Carmel www.mada-research.org

this fact is that the Arabs of 1948 have never been perceived as partners in any of the various peace processes. The paradigm regards them as subjects of the Jewish state or as ancillary to the conflict, but never as principal players in it.

To cope with this anomaly, the year 1948 must be set as the turning point in the history of the conflict, and the 1967 paradigm, in which the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is the central issue, must be rejected. The 1967 paradigm, which primarily serves the interests of the Jewish liberal elite, disseminates the illusion that Israel is a democracy that went astray due to a regrettable historical accident that took place in 1967, and that it will again become a democracy, once the end of the occupation is achieved. Viewed this way, the 1967 paradigm obscures the ethnic cleansing on which the Israeli regime is founded.

The skeleton in the closet is not limited to the ethnic cleansing of 1948. It is embodied in political theory itself. This theory has determined all conceptions of war and peace, and has been to a great extent responsible for the unending spilling of blood. The theorys main inherent danger, including for the Jews themselves, is the belief that it is possible to create a homogeneous ethno-national identity on a hermetically-sealed territorial space. A Jewish and democratic Israel needs to cope with this skeleton in order to create a new political theory that does not demand a constant state of emergency, dispossession, and political oppression.

A new Jewish political theory must return to 1948 as an Archimedean point for thinking about the conflict. Contrary to the peace discourse that removed the Arabs of 1948 from the conflict equation, it is necessary to return to negotiations that include the Arabs of 1948, and also the Palestinians as a whole (including those living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria) on defining sovereignty in a new format. My basic assumption is that division of the land into two state units with a wall separating them is not possible; it is also immoral and destructive along political, geographic, economic, civic, and religious lines. Rather than regarding sovereignty as an exclusive monopoly over territory and over national identity in the format of the Westphalia peace treaties of the midseventeenth century, I suggest considering a post-Westphalian sovereignty, a sovereignty that is, in essence, porous, non-contiguous, and multiple. It assumes the existence of cross and joint sovereignties organized in a complex manner in different spheres of a common spatial region. In a post-Westphalian sovereignty, the Jews will have to forgo the privileges they attained by means of the violence of their new sovereign in 1948 and in the decades that followed, in favor of a decentralized, fluid, and more just political structure.

Jadal Jadal Issue no.10, June 2011

In addition to the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians, a structure of this kind would take into account the gigantic gaps among the Jews themselves in matters of ethnicity, religious identities, and class differences. It would also require a radical change in the land regime in Israel. For example, the liberal Jews, who live in Tel Aviv and comprise a privileged class, will have to contribute their share in
2

Mada al-Carmel www.mada-research.org

solving the conflict, just as poor residents of the illegal settlements of Ariel or Maale Adumim will have to.

* Yehouda Shenhav is a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University and senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. This article is based on his book, Entrapped by the Green Line (2010, in Hebrew), forthcoming in English with Polity Press.

Within such a political structure of decentralized sovereignty and of open spatial movement, it will be possible to allow the return of the Palestinian refugees, not as a symbolic action in recognition of the injustice, but as a real political action. Although the return of the refugees will be based on the pre-war (1948) geography as a vision, it will simultaneously ensure that the moral and political injustice of the past is not mended by means of new injustice. I believe that only within a sovereignty structure of this kind will it be possible to also ensure the Jews rights in the spatial sphere.

Jadal Jadal Issue no.10, June 2011

Mada al-Carmel www.mada-research.org